“I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.”1
Two recent exhibitions at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Brisbane demonstrate diverse approaches to the subject of the future. These shows featured Peter Alwast’s video installation Future Perfect (2011) and the first part of Gonkar Gyatso’s sticker-induced ‘Three Realms’ (2011). While Alwast exhibits a virtual experience of the future, and involves the viewer through the transition and deviation of timelines, Gyatso considers present day problems which create anxiety in relation to their impact on the society of the future.
Eight of Alwast’s innovative, quite surrealistic looped videos, combining painting, photography and illustration with computer animation, were projected onto the gallery’s walls in a long, shadowed room. While each video is different, ‘containing sculptures, including rotating interpenetrating discs, bouncing coloured coffins and jostling cardboard cubes’,2 all encompass the idea of ‘Future Perfect’, which implies the conjunction of both future and present tenses. An example of future perfect tense is the form ‘will have’, which ‘implies looking back at something that hasn’t happened yet…’ making the present, ‘somehow deferred’.3
A video at the far left hand side of the room casts an animation of a man and a woman walking slowly towards each other, yet never entirely reaching or touching. They are viewed from changing angles, and sometimes it appears that they are in fact walking backwards. The horizon in the background suggests twilight, and the faces of the animated people possess quite stern expressions, not happy, yet not dejected either. The artist hints at the idea of time being suspended, preventing the arrival at a desired place, the in-between zone.4 Although, as one video among the eight... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline